When you bite into a piece of meat, eggs or dairy, you're contributing to animal suffering on a massive scale. In the United States alone, more than 9 billion land animals are slaughtered annually for their meat - that’s more than 280 lives per second, and doesn't even count the millions of male chicks ground alive just after birth because they're "useless" to the egg trade.

Tragically, the suffering starts long before slaughter. Virtually all animals consumed for food are raised in crowded, disease-ridden factory farms that put profit over animal welfare. Chickens and turkeys are raised to be so obese they cannot walk under their own weight. Mother pigs are housed in gestation crates too small to turn around in, and forced to breed over and over until their bodies are spent. Egg-laying hens are housed in cages so small they cannot even spread their wings.

A Look at Factory Farm Animals

Pigs in cramped gestation crates on a factory farm.

A wounded pig trapped inside of a factory farm gestation crate.

Decapitated chickens hanging from a slaughterhouse conveyer belt.

Chickens crowded into cages just before slaughter.

Chicken slaughter is especially horrific, as seen in LCA's undercover footage below. The birds are crammed together into small wire cages, piled onto trucks and sent to slaughterhouses that kill the chickens in brutal assembly-line style. The birds are shackled upside-down to a hanging conveyer belt while fully conscious, and dipped into an electrified water bath before a mechanized blade cuts off their heads. The chickens are then plunged into a scalding water tank. Many are scalded alive because the blade fails to decapitate them. (Turkeys are slaughtered using this brutal method, as well).

Even animals from small, so-called “humane” farms suffer greatly. For example, LCA’s undercover investigation of the Pel-Freez rabbit slaughterhouse revealed extreme cruelty: Workers hit the rabbits in the head with knives, flipped them upside-down, broke one leg to hang them from a hook, and decapitated them, all while many rabbits were fully conscious and screaming. These rabbits all came from small farms, and many were marketed as “humanely raised.”

3. Spread the word! Educate your friends and family on the suffering behind animal products, and share this page on social media. The more people learn about the horrors of the animal industry, the more animals will be spared.

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87% of all agricultural land in the U.S. is used to raise animals for food.